Hallelujah Lads and Lasses
Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-1930
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
So strongly associated is the Salvation Army with its modern mission of service that its colorful history as a religious movement is often overlooked. In telling the story of the organization in America, Lillian Taiz traces its evolution from a working-class, evangelical religion to a movement that emphasized service as the path to salvation.
When the Salvation Army crossed the Atlantic from Britain in 1879, it immediately began to adapt its religious culture to its new American setting. The group found its constituency among young, working-class men and women who were attracted to its intensely experiential religious culture, which combined a frontier-camp-meeting style with working-class forms of popular culture modeled on the saloon and theater. In the hands of these new recruits, the Salvation Army developed a remarkably democratic internal culture. By the turn of the century, though, as the Army increasingly attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical needs of the masses, the group began to turn away from boisterous religious expression toward a more "refined" religious culture and a more centrally controlled bureaucratic structure.
Placing her focus on the membership of the Salvation Army and its transformation as an organization within the broader context of literature on class, labor, and women's history, Taiz sheds new light on the character of American working-class culture and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taiz (California State University, Los Angeles) makes a valuable contribution to the bumper crop of books about the Salvation Army. Like several recent monographs, this book usefully charts the transformation of the Army from a primarily evangelistic sect to the kindly bell-ringers we know today, raising money and collecting goods for the poor. Though Taiz does offer readers a glimpse of the Army's founders and leaders, her book is distinguished from many studies by its attention to the ordinary men and women, the "hallelujah lads and lasses" of the title, who devoted their lives to the Army. Through a careful reading of their conversion narratives, Taiz suggests that Salvationists wanted to "escape some of the riskier aspects of their world," like prostitution and liquor. Taiz occasionally dwells too long on familiar, even obvious, points, such as the militaristic imagery of the Army. Her discussion of what she calls "democracy" in the Army making piety available to working-class urbanites by combining "the culture of the saloon and music hall with a frontier-camp meeting style" does not add much to Diane Winston's pioneering discussion of the topic in Red Hot and Righteous. Still, Taiz has crafted a compelling story about evangelism and urban relief in America, and she tells it in remarkably crisp prose. Armchair Army-ites and scholars alike will enjoy this book.
